Category Archives: Polemics

Polemics

What is the scientific evidence for intelligent design?

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This article summarizes three types of evidence for intelligent design.

They are:

  1. Fine-tuning of the laws of physics to allow for advanced life
  2. Information in life
  3. Irreducible complexity

(Not discussed in the article are three other mainstream scientific arguments against naturalism, from the origin of the universe, habitability-observability convergence and the sudden origin of body plans in the fossil record)

Recall that intelligent design is based on the notion of specified complexity. A sequence of symbols is complex if it is composed of a large number of symbols. It is specified if it conforms to an independent pattern. If it is large and conforms to a pattern, then it exhibits specified complexity. Sequences that exhibit specified complexity are designed.

Examples:

  • Neither complex, nor specified: “AB”
  • Complex, not specified: “AB KN IH KML NIFCS YDH HOEHS KFSA”
  • Specified, not complex: “The”
  • Complex and specified: “Obama is the worst president ever”

Now you know more about intelligent design than 99.9% of journalists who bash intelligent design.

Here’s a snap shot of each of three basic arguments for intelligent design:

Fine-tuning

The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry to allow for advanced life is an example of extremely high levels of CSI in nature. The laws of the universe are complex because they are highly unlikely. Cosmologists have calculated the odds of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance are less than one part in 1010^123. That’s ten raised to a power of 10 with 123 zeros after it! The laws of the universe are specified in that they match the narrow band of parameters required for the existence of advanced life.

The Origin of Life

Studies of the cell reveal vast quantities of biochemical information stored in our DNA in the sequence of nucleotides.  No physical or chemical law dictates the order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA, and the sequences are highly improbable and complex. Moreover, the coding regions of DNA exhibit sequential arrangements of bases that are necessary to produce functional proteins. In other words, they are highly specified with respect to the independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis.

Irreducible complexity

One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can tested and discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function.  When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. This method has been used to detect irreducible complexity in a variety of biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum.

Now you know what the word “intelligent design” really refers to. Notice that it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, in much the same way as atheism nothing to do with science.

Polemics

Do biology textbooks lie to prove evolution?

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Lately, a lot of people have been stopping by the blog to learn about the how left-leaning scientists are producing faked evidence of global warming in order to support President Obama in his efforts to pass cap and trade.

…and so on.

You might even see evidence against global warming being suppressed. Michelle Malkin writes about the suppression of an EPA report that would have undermined the rationale for the cap-and-trade bill.

Excerpt:

The Obama administration doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don’t want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion-dollar, thousand-page “cap and trade” bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.

On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls, etc.”

It’s important to understand that  left-leaning scientists have many reasons for doing things like this. Some of the reasons are political.

Here are just two examples.

  1. Many academics spend their entire lives in academia working on esoteric research of marginal utility. They depend for their livelihoods in large measure on research money awarded by the government. They therefore tend to want to prove their importance to the public and the government by inventing crises that require more research money and bigger government budgets.
  2. In additional, many academics are jealous of hard-working entrepreneurs in private industry, who are able to earn more money by pleasing customers with useful products and services than they can by talking and writing papers on topics of marginal utility.

For these reasons and others, it is common for a “scientific consensus” to emerge among  left-leaning scientists to prove things that are not true in order to achieve certain social and/or political results desired by these left-leaning scientists. (Note: you can verify that the majority of university professors are left-leaning by looking at their political donations – which are overwhelmingly Democrat)

Evolution

Evolution is virtually identical to global warming. Naturalists embraced evolution for many reasons, none of them related to actual evidence.

Among these reasons are the following:

  1. As Cornelius Hunter has documented, naturalists felt that if God were the designer of life, then he wouldn’t have done it in a way that involved so much suffering and waste.
  2. Naturalists, like everyone else, are resentful of the demands of the moral law on their autonomy. Rather than wasting time on theology and religious observances, they would prefer to be doing whatever they want – without any social disapproval. A theory like evolution could be foisted on the public in order to marginalize God, and his obligations, in one swoop.

Let’s learn about one of the ways that naturalists lie to the public in order to achieve desired social and political ends.

Lies my biology textbook told me

Jonathan Wells, a biologist with Ph.Ds from Yale and UC Berkeley, writes about one example of fake evidence here:

Charles Darwin thought that “by far the strongest” evidence that humans and fish are descended from a common ancestor was the striking similarity of their early embryos. According to Darwin, the fact that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar… reveals community of descent.” 2 To illustrate this, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel made some drawings in the 1860s to show that the embryos of vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) look almost identical in their earliest stages.

But Haeckel faked his drawings. Not only do they distort vertebrate embryos by making them appear more similar than they really are (in a way that Stephen Jay Gould wrote “can only be called fraudulent” 3), but they also omit classes and stages that do not fit Darwin’s theory. Most significantly, Haeckel omitted the earliest stages, in which vertebrate embryos are strikingly different from each other. The stage he portrayed as the first is actually midway through development. Yet according to Darwin’s logic, early dis-similarities do not provide evidence for common ancestry.

Haeckel used his faked drawings to support not only Darwinian evolution, but also his own “Biogenetic Law,” which stated that embryos pass through the adult stages of their ancestors in the process of development.

…Haeckel’s drawings were exposed as fakes by his own contemporaries, and his Biogenetic Law was thoroughly discredited by 20th century biologists. It is now generally acknowledged that early embryos never resemble the adults of their supposed ancestors. A modern version of recapitulation claims that early embryos resemble the embryos of their ancestors, but since fossil embryos are extremely rare, this claim is little more than speculation based on the assumption that Darwin’s theory is true.

Now the standard response from Darwinists: no textbooks are still using the fraudulent embryo images. Is it true? It’s as true as global warming!

You can see the actual faked pictures from the modern textbooks here. These textbooks were being produced as late as 2004, even though the fraud was detected in the 1800s! Is this the vaunted self-correction of science, or science being twisted to support social and political goals?

And this excerpt from that article is interesting:

Some Darwinists continue to deny that there has been any misuse of Haeckel in recent times. If that is the case, why did Stephen Jay Gould attack how textbooks use Haeckel in 2000? Gould wrote: “We should… not be surprised that Haeckel’s drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks!” (emphasis added) Similarly, in 1997, the leading embryologist Michael K. Richardson lamented in the journal Anatomy and Embyology that “Another point to emerge from this study is the considerable inaccuracy of Haeckel’s famous figures. These drawings are still widely reproduced in textbooks and review articles, and continue to exert a significant influence on the development of ideas in this field.” (emphases added)

And you can read about the 700 scientists who doubt that natural selection and mutation are sufficient to produce the diversity of life here.

Polemics

Responding to the parable of the blind men and the elephant

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This article on Stand to Reason is worth reading again and again until you get it! We live in a postmodern world, where people believe that religion is a matter of personal preference. Young people especially assert that no knowledge of God is possible, and that we are all grasping at straws when it comes to knowing God and making sense of morality.

First, let’s take a look at the parable:

In the children’s book, The Blind Men and the Elephant, Lillian Quigley retells the ancient fable of six blind men who visit the palace of the Rajah and encounter an elephant for the first time.  As each touches the animal with his hands, he announces his discoveries.

The first blind man put out his hand and touched the side of the elephant.  “How smooth!  An elephant is like a wall.”  The second blind man put out his hand and touched the trunk of the elephant.  “How round!  An elephant is like a snake.”  The third blind man put out his hand and touched the tusk of the elephant.  “How sharp!  An elephant is like a spear.”  The fourth blind man put out his hand and touched the leg of the elephant.  “How tall!  An elephant is like a tree.”  The fifth blind man reached out his hand and touched the ear of the elephant.  “How wide!  An elephant is like a fan.”  The sixth blind man put out his hand and touched the tail of the elephant.  “How thin!  An elephant is like a rope.”

An argument ensued, each blind man thinking his own perception of the elephant was the correct one.  The Rajah, awakened by the commotion, called out from the balcony.  “The elephant is a big animal,” he said.  “Each man touched only one part.  You must put all the parts together to find out what an elephant is like.”

Enlightened by the Rajah’s wisdom, the blind men reached agreement.  “Each one of us knows only a part.  To find out the whole truth we must put all the parts together.”

And then Greg explains why this is a problem for Christianity:

The religious application holds that every faith represents just one part of a larger truth about God.  Each has only a piece of the truth, ultimately leading to God by different routes.  Advocates of Eastern religions are fond of using the parable in this way.

The second application is used by skeptics who hold that cultural biases have so seriously blinded us that we can never know the true nature of things.  This view, de rigueur in the university, is called post-modernism.

This skepticism holds for all areas of truth, including the rational, the religious, and the moral.  In Folkways, a classic presentation of cultural relativism, anthropologist William Graham Sumner argues that morality is not objective in any sense.  “Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is delusion,” he states.

Sumner is making a very strong assertion about knowledge.  He says that all claims to know objective truth are false because each of us is imprisoned in his own culture, incapable of seeing beyond the limits of his own biases.  Sumner concludes, therefore, that truth is relative to culture and that no objective standard exists.

I want everyone reading who doesn’t know how to respond to this challenge to click through to STR’s web site, read the correct response, and then explain it to your spouse, children and/or pet(s). (If Dennis Prager can lecture geese in Ohio, then you can explain the blind men and the elephant to your pet(s)) The important thing is that you feel comfortable explaining it to other people.

You learn these things by reading, and then by trying to explain what you’ve learned to people around you – especially to the people who don’t agree with you. So, go to work, and leave a comment about your experience below!

One last thing. Christians – I forbid you to argue using parallels, analogies or parables like this. (I’m looking at you, my Catholic readers!) When you argue for your view, don’t use these whacky stories. Jesus used miracles to prove his statements. But you can’t perform miracles. So you can argue using the miracles in nature, and the miracle of the resurrection from history. Find your evidence here, and see it applied in debates here.